Archive of an Unseen

Undershed, Bristol

30 November 2024 – 5 January 2024

Review by Ella Sinclair

Christopher Samuel’s interactive installation Archive of an Unseen is part of Sing the Body Electric – an exhibition at Bristol’s Undershed gallery, a new space for immersive and interactive artwork. Sing the Body Electric is an immersive enquiry into the body from different angles, and it requires you to participate with your own. All three pieces on display – Samuel’s Archive of an Unseen, Sanne De Wilde’s Island of the Colourblind, and Yeseul Song’s Two Subtle Bodies – ask their audience to think, choose, and engage. And there’s a lot to engage with. The hour given to immerse oneself in all three installations could easily be spent with Samuel’s work alone.

Toy-like and clad in bright, block colours, Archive of an Unseen is deceiving. What initially could be a fun arcade game reveals a rich archive full of depth and difficulty, detailing the stages of the artist’s life growing up Black, disabled, and working class in London in the 1980s and 90s. 

Right away, participants have no choice but to participate. Given a chair, a pair of headphones, and four buttons, they are asked to interact with the microform in front of them, diving into the archives of Samuel’s early life. What do you choose to omit, to click through, and what do you choose to notice? Archive of an Unseen asks its audience to become archivists.

Samuel divides his childhood and adolescence into segments: pre-diagnosis, diagnosis, living with early stages, schools, holiday, on the move, being a teenager, and leaving school. Each section is comprehensive, consisting of a plethora of archival images from childhood photographs to medical records and school reports, with a video explainer by Samuel, who cogently talks his participant through the raw complexities of each category. 

Like so many stories of Caribbean heritage in Britain, Samuel’s opens with a black and white photograph of the Empire Windrush, marking his grandfather’s arrival from the Caribbean. From there, Samuel takes you through his early life, describing the discrimination and dismissal his mother, a Black single parent, faced from healthcare professionals when she initially suspected that her son was disabled. It wasn’t until a teacher – eventually noticing what his mother had already known for years – wrote a letter to the doctor, that his mother was finally listened to. This was the catalyst for his Charcot-Marie-Tooth diagnosis.

Once diagnosed, around the age of five, Samuel entered the medicalised world. Participants sift through a flurry of medical records as Samuel describes its complexity which, he explains, gave him the attention he so desperately wanted, but which also sought to ‘fix’ him.

Archive of an Unseen responds directly to the harms the medical gaze of disability engenders, in particular to the archival gaps and silences it creates. This installation grew out of Samuel’s previous research into the Archives at Wellcome Collection (the UK’s largest social and medical archive), where he found no first person accounts from disabled people, and the experiences of disabled people of colour to be underrepresented. Samuel’s Archive of an Unseen completely subverts this reality. It’s his story, as told and shown by him, according to his own narrative, which is honest and full of emotional depth. 

Samuels is unapologetic about his truth-telling. The exhibition ends with the category ‘leaving school’, where Samuel, as a young man, experiences the full hostility of an ableist society. As his condition progresses, he uses his wheelchair more and more, and faces discrimination from employers. His social circle shrinks as the places he can access become more limited. His world becomes smaller. He describes feeling hopeless. 

There is no sugar-coating. The final image that participants are left with is an emotive drawing of his room in 1996 by Samuel, depicting in expressive black lines the distress he felt about his situation. 

Entrusted with the real, unpalatable truth, participants will find it hard to walk away from Archive of an Unseen without carrying it through with them to the rest of the exhibition and beyond. Being invited to actively engage with Samuel’s story, as told by him, creates an embodied space for it, and the important themes he addresses. Samuel’s installation – as well as the others on display at Undershed – require that we go beyond simply viewing artwork into active bodily participation, where we make enquiries into the bodily lives of others with our own.

https://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/season/669/sing-the-body-electric